Subscribe to the latest research through IGI Global's new InfoSci-OnDemand Plus

InfoSci®-OnDemand Plus, a subscription-based service, provides researchers the ability to access full-text content from over 100,000 peer-reviewed book chapters and 26,000+ scholarly journal articles covering 11 core subjects. Users can select articles or chapters that meet their interests and gain access to the full content permanently in their personal online InfoSci-OnDemand Plus library.

Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, Fourth Edition (10 Volumes) Now 50% Off

Take 50% off when purchasing the Encyclopedia directly through IGI Global's Online Bookstore. Plus, receive the complimentary e-books for the first, second, and third editions with the purchase of the Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, Fourth Edition e-book.

InfoSci®-Journals Annual Subscription Price for New Customers: As Low As US$ 5,100

This collection of over 175 e-journals offers unlimited access to highly-cited, forward-thinking content in full-text PDF and XML with no DRM. There are no platform or maintenance fees and a guarantee of no more than 5% increase annually.

The state-of-the art technology in a web environment is adding semantic meaning to web recourses. Currently these resources are usually only human understandable: the hypertext mark-up language (HTML) only provides information for textual and graphical information intended for human consumption. Semantic Web aims for machine understandable information that can be processed and shared by both computers and humans. Tim Berners-Lee (2001) provides the definition of the Semantic Web as “an extension of the current one [Web], in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.”

Key Terms in this Chapter

Web Service: A software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network.

KIF: Knowledge Interchange Format is a computer-oriented language for the interchange of knowledge among disparate computer programs.

Description Logics: A family of knowledge representation (KR) formalisms that represent the knowledge of an application domain by first defining the relevant concepts of the domain (its terminology), and then using these concepts to specify properties of objects and individuals occurring in the domain.

Semantic Web service: They are the server end of a client-server system for machine-to-machine interaction via the World Wide Web. Semantic services are a component of the semantic web because they use markup that makes data machine-readable in a detailed and sophisticated way.

RDF: Resource Description Framework is a family of W3C specifications that have been used as a general method for conceptual modeling of information that is implemented in web resources.

Reasoner: A software system able to infer logical consequences from a set of asserted facts or axioms.